A replica of the Statue of Liberty, called 'Freedom to pollute' on a hill near the Bella Centre in Copenhagen. The year started on a downer after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 failed to produce a deal. The talks were seen as the best chance to agree on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, but ended acrimoniously after several countries rejected the Copenhagen accord, a non-binding agreement

March: A peasant farmer walks on a dusty track with spares for his broken-down tractor in Qixingcun in drought-stricken Yunnan province in south-west China. The lack of significant rainfall since September 2009 turned the normally temperate region into a parched environmental disaster zone. Some 310 reservoirs, 580 rivers and 3,600 pools were baked dry by a once-in-a-century drought that evaporated drinking supplies, devastated crops and stirred up political tensions over dam construction, monoculture plantations and cross-border water management in south-east Asia

Professor Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, found himself at the centre of controversy in 2009. The theft and subsequent leaking online of hundreds of private emails and documents exchanged between many of the world's leading climate scientists led to claims that they showed scientists manipulating and suppressing data to back up a theory of man-made climate change. However, four separate inquiries completed in 2010 cleared Jones and his colleagues of the most serious charges. Instead, questions were levelled at the way in which they responded to requests for information

April: The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns after an explosion on the 20th which killed 11 workers, injured 17, and became the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. The blast was triggered by a bubble of methane gas, an investigation by owners BP later revealed. For the next three months a ruptured sea floor 'gusher' spilt an estimated 4.9m barrels of oil, or around 200m US gallons of crude, into the Gulf of Mexico

Nesting pelicans fly over an oil-coated shoreline in Barataria Bay, just inside the the coast of Louisiana. The jury is still out on the ecological damage done to the already polluted, and over-fished sea, but estimates range from long-term catastrophe to relatively minor harm

July: Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and Senator John Kerry leave a news conference. A major climate change bill that would have capped carbon emissions was abandoned by Democrats in the US Senate in the face of opposition from both sides of the house. Democrats have been trying to pass a plan that charges power plants, manufacturers and other large polluters for their carbon dioxide emissions, the leading contributor to global warming, for more than a year. But it ran into opposition from Republican senators, as well as Democrats eager not to jeopardise their chances in November's midterm elections

July: A family rescued by army soldiers sail past a truck heavy with passengers taking shelter from heavy floods in Nowshera, north-west Pakistan. Devastating flooding was estimated to have affected at least 14 million people across the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh provinces, officials said

Gaagaa Gidom, a 60-year-old fisherman and father of eight, looks at the spilled crude oil floating in the waters of the Niger Delta. In August, a three-year investigation by the United Nations almost entirely exonerated Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation. The company spilled nearly 14,000 tons of crude oil into the creeks of the Niger Delta last year, the company announced, blaming thieves and militants for the environmental damage

September: Stockpiles of rare earth ore at the Mount Weld mine in Western Australia. Mining was a key issue in the Australian election. The hugely unpopular planned 40% 'super tax' on the mining sector was partly blamed for the downfall of the former PM Kevin Rudd. His successor, Julia Gillard, revised the tax down to 30% after talks with BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata. Environmentalists want Australia to end its dependency on mining, commodity exports and coal power by moving more emphatically towards renewable energy

October:Hermann Scheer, German politician and tireless champion of renewable energy, died unexpectedly aged 66. Scheer, who campaigned for the promotion of renewable energies - in particular solar power - long before it was fashionable to do so, is credited with boosting the status of alternative energy, both at home and abroad, thanks to his visionary zeal

December: The year ended in Cancún, Mexico, the venue for the COP16 UN climate talks. Once again the talks failed to produce a legally binding deal to cut global emissions, with critics saying the agreements that were reached did little more than restore faith in the UN negotiating process. The deal, which took four years of negotiations to reach, should lead to less deforestation, the transfer of technology to developing countries and the establishment of a yearly fund, potentially worth up to $100bn (£64bn), to help countries adapt to climate change